goodbyes

On the first day I started this w/ an entry on the coffee shops- local guys (always guys) who serve coffee (ok, Nescafe, or cafe Touba) on many corners from rolling carts.  I mentioned then that Abou sold his from a cardboard box.  He's still doing so, but I've worked with him to prepare a microcredit loan application w/ a local agency.  He's written a couple drafts of the proposal and I've passed it to the director of the organization.  He's there six days a week from 7 AM until his hot water thermoses run out.  Jobs here remain impossible, and people do things like this all the time for a few dollars a day.  A student today told me he worked as a janitor for 1500cfa/day.  Just over three dollars.  I hope to see a picture of a new coffee cart sometime soon.  Insh'allah.

Babocar or 'Homicide' as he likes to be known (I've renamed him 'Daisy') is my strongest student.  He'd read an overview of the rest of The Scarlet Letter and was quizzing me today about the meanings of the events while we walked.  He's also the only Wade supporter in the class, but he's gotten pretty quiet about that.  Today several of the students met for the last time to say goodbye.  The didn't know about the four US college programs in Dakar, so I gave them contact information, introduced them to Ryan who lives in my house from one of the programs, and even stopped to random girls from the SIT program on the street and made introductions.  They plan on proposing conversation groups or perhaps even study groups to one or two of these groups to continue their work together. Given the general disregard and dysfunction of the university system, they know they need to take initiative.  They were so appreciative of our class, and I damn near got teary about saying goodbye to them, although they didn't like my hugs preferring 'gangster' handshakes and shoulder slams.

The Scarlet Letter

 Before starting class today, I stopped upstairs and found Pape buried in papers.  He was reading and marking from these stacks that look incomprehensible to me.  And yes, he's on strike, and yes, there are no classes going on, but Phd candidates are still taking oral exams and other students still have to pass to the next level which is what these papers are from.

Here are some of my students reading The Scarlet Letter.  We're still getting through about four to five pages in a two hour class, with reading, reading aloud, paraphrase, translation and discussion.  Today's question was why does the text, and presumably Hawthorne reject Puritan law?  If it's the law of the religion and the state, and if Hester broke it, then doesn't she deserve the penalty?  This more conservative voice was quickly countered by some others, and that lead to a good discussion of church state separation.

The hardest part of the class is the fact that these desks are fixed to the floor and immovable.  It's impossible to get into a circle, and only a few of them have joined me on the bench in the front of the class facing the others.  It's a new concept that most don't really embrace.

creeping acceptance

Wednesday, I worked with the girls from the Lycee JFK on their video projects.  We met at the school which remains a hang out for kids despite the strike.  Mamadou works with these students in part because of the relationship with the Philadelphia school which isn’t, of course, on strike and still might move forward with an exchange, although the political situation may change that, too.

The students arrived on time, dressed in their uniforms mostly, and worked on their scripts diligently, apart from some requisite texting and facebooking.  They know the exchange might not move forward, but never seemed to question the effort.    They wrote sweet self-introductions that described families, hobbies, and mostly favorite television shows and singers.  They have a French habit of putting ‘etcetera’ at the end of each list which I tried unsuccessfully to extinguish.  I was more successful getting them to make their verbs all parallel, either infinitive or present progressive.  

As we worked, I realized I hadn’t reacted this time to the state of the classrooms, the graffiti, the dust, the broken doors, the fact that not much had been done to these buildings since Kennedy administration money built them in 1964. And it struck me that same sort of natural, perhaps necessary, creeping acceptance allows these students to accept the fact that they might well lose and have to repeat a year, (an ‘annee blanche’, a term we don’t even have).  University students understand the costs better and wear t-shirts protesting the loss of their education.  But somehow, the government and the people largely accept a dysfunctional education system that goes on strike regularly, that warehouses university students for years with too many students chasing too few diplomas with too few resources, and most tragically, that doesn’t create the educated population needed to function in the world.  

In St. Louis, a small, noisy two room Islamic school next door to my hotel taught elementary students through oral repetition.  Seated in rows on the floor, they chanted together for classes.  During lunch, they lined their wooden tablets w/ black charcoal script neatly up against the wall and ate together from large metal bowls.  I know that few US students would line their tablets/ipads up so carefully.  I don't know how much these memorized lessons and respect for authority will ultimately serve these students. 

Where I share my medical expertise

Yesterday, I taught Pape's class from the IPDSR (Institut de Formation et de Recherche pour le Developpement et Sante de Reproduction) a lesson on the American health care system.  These students come from Chad, Ivory Coast, Gabon & Burkina Faso.  None of them are Senegalese.  Pape teaches them medical English, which means technical terminology but also conversation and general language skills.  I started by asking what they already knew, and found that some knew more about Obama's health care plans than many Americans.  When I asked what 'health' means, trying to define terms, one rattled off the World Health Organization's definition verbatim, and everybody cracked up.  It was part of their reading for yesterday, which I didn't know.  After I got into some comparative statistics and global healthy system rankings, they were, of course, shocked by the costs of the American health care system.  When I reported the health insurance cost for Jada, Lisa and I, including the amounts our schools pay, they quickly took out the calculators on their phones to translate it into CFA's (the local currency).  They were dumbfounded.  And when we discussed the infant mortality rate in the US (6.7 per 1000- highest in the developed world) one asked why we spent so much money on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I could only agree with him.  It was one of many moments when the situation of people here makes it very difficult to justify the privilege of our lives there.